As it turned out, Doctus had arrived with only half a plan. She had obtained enough information on the Apocryphos' defenses to have a general idea of how to get past them, but she hadn't had time to develop a strategy in depth. That responsibility fell to Juli and Captain Roman, with input from the others.

"The fortress has three main weapons systems that are controlled separately," said Juli, standing in front of the console on the bridge, "so you won't be able to shut them down all at once. The first line of defense consists of one hundred forty-four mobile turrets orbiting the main structure. They receive commands from twelve control stations inside the fortress. It'll be up to Captain Roman's unit to disable those." She bent over the keyboard to adjust the display on the screen. "In the meantime, MOMO and the others should be able to get inside and take out the next line of defense. There are seven installations built into the walls of the fortress, but their control stations are linked together here, at the top of the central shaft. I'll warn you now, it's going to be difficult. And probably very dangerous. The three of you,"--her gaze passed briefly over MOMO, Ziggy, and Doctus--"will have to make it to the top on your own."

"But you'll have our support on the way out," said Roman. "We'll rendezvous in Sector 180 and proceed to the extraction point from there. We should be able to commandeer an escape capsule for the trip back."

"And Miyuki and I will be monitoring your progress from outside," Juli added.

"Understood." Ziggy studied the diagram on the screen behind her. "What about the third weapon?"

Juli drew a sharp, pained breath. For a moment her eyes had the desperate look Ziggy remembered seeing the day she had tried to dissuade him from taking on the Patmos assignment, but they hardened again as she found her resolve. "That one is located in the shaft below the main control room. It's linked directly to the Zohar emulator, and indirectly to the controls for the other two weapon systems. We think it can be disabled either by breaking the link with the emulator or destroying the weapon itself, but you'll have to shut down the primary and secondary defenses first."

"I see." He stared again at the diagram, trying to memorize the plan for the control room and the passage that led into it. "So the purpose of this facility is to provide energy for that weapon?"

Doctus shook her head. "That's part of it, but it's not the only purpose. The entire fortress is designed to act as an amplifier for the power source, and the central column has a structure similar to the AMN's axis. Once that thing starts up, it'll cause a spatial distortion that merges real and imaginary space around it, potentially allowing anything in the affected region to bypass the AMN safeguards and manifest in this domain."

"Including the shadow network?" MOMO stared up at Doctus in alarm. "If he--if Voyager manifests his will here, what will happen?"

"I hope we don't have to find out," said Doctus. "But since the Apocryphos is fully assembled now, whatever's going to happen may already have begun."

Ziggy stepped back from the console. When he closed his eyes he could still see the floor plan clearly in his mind; it was a mental exercise he often used to prepare himself for a mission. As long as he could focus on the plans before him, the calculations of strategy and the laws of survival, he could ignore everything else--the noise in his mind, the doubts and fears and half-recalled memories clamoring to resurface.

For once, despite the implications of what Doctus had just said, he felt detached from the situation and perfectly calm--at least on the surface, if he ignored the noise underneath. Voyager had already made it clear that his involvement with Ziggy was incidental to his true objective, and whatever happened now wouldn't just affect Ziggy or the people he knew: not just MOMO and Juli and the others, but all of Second Miltia and the Immigrant Fleet and the rest of the world, if Voyager's ambition reached beyond this place unchecked. Somehow he found it easier to focus when the stakes encompassed everything, when the consequences of failure were too enormous to comprehend. All he had to do was concentrate on his assignment. The rest lay beyond his control, but acknowledging that brought him relief for once, instead of despair.

After the briefing, he and MOMO and Doctus, Captain Roman and her team, and Juli and Miyuki, made their way from the bridge to the dock where Roman's ship had landed earlier. Once the AEWS and Doctus' AMWS had been transferred on board along with the rest of their equipment, the smaller ship left the Dämmerung and short-jumped to a set of coordinates just outside the Apocryphos. The Special Ops ship had cloaking devices and visual camouflage similar to those used by Scientia, so approaching the fortress undetected should pose no difficulty; their first challenge would be making their way inside. Within a certain radius, Immigrant Fleet vessels thronged around the fortress like worshippers before a holy relic, but none of them took notice of the small Federation spacecraft in their midst, invisible to radar and human observation, an interloper among pilgrims.

As the ship neared the Apocryphos, they made their final preparations in the AMWS hangar on the lower deck.

"MOMO, I'd like you to go with Doctus," said Ziggy. "I'll go alone in the AEWS."

"But--"

He shook his head firmly. "It's for your protection. That goes for you too, Doctus." He didn't know how vulnerable she was in her current state, but since her repairs last time had taken so long, he suspected it was more than she admitted. "I don't want to see either of you trying anything heroic."

Doctus gave him an incredulous look, then shrugged. "What do you think, MOMO? Can we avoid all unnecessary heroism? That might prove difficult, especially if we end up having to haul this guy out of trouble again."

MOMO didn't answer. She had been unusually quiet and restless since before the meeting, and even more so afterward; several times he had caught her staring at him with concern. He could tell there was something on her mind, but now seemed the wrong time to ask.

"I mean it," said Ziggy. "If anything happens to me, concentrate on protecting each other and completing the mission. Remember what's at stake here; that should be your priority. Don't risk your lives on my account."

"Yes, sir." Doctus didn't bother to disguise her sarcasm. He stared into the hard lenses over her eyes. Below them, the rest of her face remained expressionless.

"All right," he said finally. "I'm not the one giving orders anyway. Do what you feel is necessary."

MOMO kept silent, but her eyes sought his for a brief second before she climbed into the co-pilot's seat on the Astraea. He wanted to reassure her, but he didn't know what to say; he couldn't put her fears about the mission at ease without deceiving her and himself. He boarded the AEWS and followed the larger craft out to the ship's airlock; as they neared the fortress, an AMN screen opened on the control panel in front of him.

"Jan, listen." Juli's voice sounded breathless under the static. "The shadow network is reacting with the spatial distortion. It's causing a lot of interference on the AMN, and it seems to be getting worse the closer we get to the center of the phenomenon. You can probably still communicate with each other over a short range, but you won't be able to reach us on the outside. Miyuki is alerting the others now. I don't know how much longer I'll be able to stay in contact with you, so ...." The transmission dropped out for a moment as flecks of white noise riddled the screen like bullet holes. "... sorry we never had a chance to finish our conversation."

His breath caught. In the time they had known each other he had left more than a few conversations unfinished, and there were countless others he never had the words to begin. Everything he hadn't told her, all the vows he had consigned to silence when he'd thought silence was enough, rushed to escape now, in the moments he had left. All but one of them stuck in his throat. "When we get back, I promise ...."

Static hissed from the blank screen. He waited a moment, then closed the connection.

Ahead of him, the Astraea landed on a ledge before an opening in the outer wall of the fortress. He pushed forward and landed the AEWS beside it. From here he could make out the green-glass mirage of the Federation military ship as it dropped away below the ledge, following the curve of the wall farther down to where Captain Roman and her group would be landing.

"Still with us?" Doctus' voice crackled over the intercom, the transmission fuzzed with static but still intelligible. He looked ahead, saw the banded neon glow from the Astraea diminishing down the passageway, and hurried to catch up. They passed through an airlock and emerged in the spiral corridor that wound the length of the fortress, curving up and around the central shaft. The corridor itself was constructed of a smooth black material, doorways marked with sector numbers spaced at intervals along its inward-sloping walls. The dark panels barely reflected the glow from white strips of light that arced like ribs between segments of wall, or the alternating dashes of red and violet guide-lights set into the floor; instead of illuminating the passage, the lights served only to outline a path in the darkness.

The sector numbers increased as they moved higher up the passage. At several points on the way they encountered guards--unmanned auto-techs and human soldiers piloting Nov-OS-issued AMWS units, neither of which proved much of a challenge against the combined output of the Astraea and the AEWS. Still, their fighting set off alarms throughout the fortress; the white bars of light along the hallway throbbed red, and a broadcast announcement warned of intruders in a growing list of sectors, including several Ziggy was certain they hadn't passed through because the numbers were too low. It seemed Captain Roman's intrusion hadn't gone unnoticed either. But MOMO's group hadn't been able to make AMN contact with Roman's since they entered, and there was no way of confirming their status.

The hallway terminated in a dead end at the top of the spiral, spanned by a massive pair of doors inscribed with the numerals 364. Doctus and MOMO reached the door first, and when Ziggy arrived moments later, Doctus steered the AMWS aside. "Have at it," she said over the intercom.

"I'm disengaging the output restraints now." He charged the AEWS unit's blade weapon and gestured for MOMO and Doctus to stand clear. When he released the charge, a blue-white bar of energy arced from the sword's edge, throwing the AEWS back in recoil. The glare overloaded his optical sensors, blinding him until it died away; when his vision readjusted to normal, he found himself staring into a ragged opening like a mouth gaping in agony, its jaws bristling with torn edges of metal and frayed ends of wires.

"That ... really was kind of awesome," said MOMO after a few seconds of silence. "I guess Miyuki wasn't kidding."

"The guards are catching up with us." He sensed their pursuit farther down the passage before the AEWS' radar confirmed it. "We'll have to hurry and shut down the defense system before they get here."

They passed through the doorway into a drum-shaped chamber with a dais at the center, the uppermost extremity of the Apocryphos' main axis. Seven transparent columns rose from the platform to the ceiling, each one linked to a separate computer terminal at its base. Like the corridor outside, the room was black-walled, dark except for the guide-lights embedded in the floor and a cold watery glow from the cells. The light dimmed and brightened in time with the drone of machines beneath the dais, a sound that fell just within the low end of the range of human hearing, more easily felt than heard. The columns reminded Ziggy of what he had seen when he dived into the shadow network to find MOMO, and with the recollection a stirring of unease broke through his calm. He disembarked from the AEWS and walked over to the nearest of the terminals.

"Ziggy, be careful!" cried MOMO, her footsteps ringing like shots on the plated floor. "Those machines, they're connected to--"

But he had already seen it for himself. The plate at the base of the column read 05-SABAOTH, and the body suspended above it held only a distant resemblance to what must have been human at one time. Crystalline structures branched from the limbs and shoulders and wreathed a dragonlike head retaining the vestigial imprint of a face, the features atrophied beyond recognition.

"Dear god," Doctus murmured at his side. "Is that some kind of Gnosis?"

He looked over, startled; he hadn't noticed her standing there, her upturned face carved hollow in the light, her lips drawn, for once not even pretending to smile.

"There are seven life forms here," said MOMO, "and I'm detecting Gnosis-like signatures from all of them. If they're not the same as the Gnosis, they could be the result of a similar phenomenon."

Ziggy shut his eyes, as if by doing so he could erase what he had seen, but the afterimage persisted, branded on the dark against his eyelids. "It's not unlikely. Human wills that have rejected this universe ... when you consider it that way, they're not much different from the Gnosis."

"'They'?" said Doctus.

"The people who were killed by Voyager. They gave up their lives to him because he promised them a better world, one without suffering or fear. But in order to embrace that world, they had to abandon this one." He opened his eyes; the draconian face stared back at him, sightless.

Something brushed against his arm, and he flinched before he realized it was MOMO. She drew back, pale and timid in the watery glow. "I ... I'm sorry," she whispered. "Is that what he ... is that what happened to your family?"

"I don't know." He turned his head aside, jaw clenched against the pressure in his throat. "The consciousnesses I saw in the shadow network didn't look like this. Maybe only a few of them were transformed. But why? What are they doing here?"

"Probably controlling the weapon system," said Doctus. "A conventional warship would use AMN-based artificial intelligences in a setup like this, but the shadow network is an organic existence; its operating system is an altered human mind. Given that arrangement, it would make sense if he was using the consciousnesses he imprisoned as the equivalent of control programs."

MOMO's gasp echoed from the drum-like walls. "You mean the same way Ormus was using Cecily and Cathe to control the Zohar?" Even in the stark lighting, her face had gone a shade paler. "Feb said their minds were trapped in a false world too. But that means ...."

"It's already too late to save them," he said. "And in order to shut down the weapon system, we have to eliminate what's controlling it."

Doctus nodded. "If it's any consolation, they probably won't feel anything."

"All right," said MOMO. "In that case ... I'll help you." She bowed her head and stepped back from the dais, hands clasped in concentration. "Activating the Hilbert Effect."

∞

His heart still pounded in synch with the artificial heartbeat of that place as they made their way down the passage a few minutes later. In Sector 305 the guards caught up with them, blocking the way forward. The AEWS' cannons and the Astraea's weaponry cut down row after row of armored tanks and AMWS craft and humanoid drones until they broke through, but they had gone only a short distance before they met another wave of defense.

"Damage levels critical!" MOMO shouted over the noise. "Doctus, we can't go on like this! We'll never make it back to Sector 180 at this rate."

"I'm aware of that!" said Doctus, her voice a knot of frustration. The transmission cut out abruptly as the Astraea dodged fire from a Nov-OS AMWS across the corridor, then took it down in a flowering of missiles.

Ziggy searched the passage frantically. The junked remains of AMWS units and auto-techs littered the floor, and he sensed another group approaching from below. "Can you hold out for a minute longer?"

"We can give it our best shot," said Doctus.

"Ziggy, what are you--"

"Don't worry, MOMO." He charged the AEWS' blade again and aimed for a place along the outer wall of the passage. Targeting posed no difficulty--he just had to focus on the seam of light between two panels, where the integrity of the structure was most vulnerable. "Now, I want you to listen carefully, both of you." He took a deep breath, fighting a sudden wave of fatigue. The AEWS unit's armor had protected him from exertion, and it had taken longer than usual for the strain to catch up with him, but it was catching up with him now. He stared at the charge indicator on the control panel, straining to focus through the dark flashes and the litany of damage readings cluttering his visual field. "When I open the wall, get out, and get away from here. Once you leave the fortress, you'll have to move quickly; you'll have more range of movement out in the open, but you won't have much cover. I don't know what the situation's like out there, but you may still be able to meet up with Captain Roman and the others before you return to the ship. In any case, I'll try to catch up with you as soon as I'm done here."

"Ziggy, wait," MOMO started again, but Doctus cut her off.

"Got it, Captain. We'll be waiting for you. Don't worry, I'll protect MOMO and the others until you get back."

He breathed in deeply again, willing the dark clouds in his eyes to settle, the turmoil in his mind to grow still. "Thank you," he said. "For everything."

Before she could answer, he swung the blade overhead and slashed into the red strip of light. This time the rebound threw him back against the opposite wall, jarring him so hard against the pilot's harness that he blacked out for a few seconds, and when he opened his eyes he saw more blackness with the luminous outline of the AMWS inscribed on it, and then the Astraea disappeared through the opening and the black of the walls merged into the starry darkness of space so he couldn't tell where the edges were. The AEWS was strong enough to resist the rush of escaping pressure that gathered up debris from the corridor and crammed it through the breach, but he still had to struggle with the controls to make it farther down the passage before emergency bulkheads closed off the sector behind him.